Posts Tagged ‘Republican betrayal’

“Give us money, so we can re-elect spineless leaders to ignore you until next election.”

I just got an email from the RNC, begging for money, again. I get them all the time, but, as I sometimes do, I will respond to this one in an “open letter” format.

The immediate trigger for this open letter was reading the following paragraph:

Nothing would make The New York Times, The Washington Post or The Huffington Post happier than printing articles in April that the Republican Party is finished because the RNC’s Federal Election Commission first quarter report showed us lagging behind in donations from our nationwide network of conservative grassroots supporters.

Herein we find one of the stupidest things the Stupid Party believes: That we should give a damn what The New York Times, The Washington Post or The Huffington Post thinks.

A pathetic and pointless desire for approval from these left-leaning media hacks is one of the most glaring weaknesses of the Stupid Party “leadership.” This “leadership” has brought us to this precipice, over which is a socialist autocracy in which the Constitution is an irrelevant, historical curiosity.

If the “leadership” had rejected the $105 Billion land mine in the continuing resolution that funds the implementation of the obscenity known as Obamacare; if it had rejected the taxpayer subsidy for killing unborn children to be handed to Planned Parenthood; if it had rejected taxpayer funding of the government’s left-wing propaganda organ, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, there might be a whisper of a chance I would give the RNC a dime.

Of course, none of that happened. The “leadership” in the House won’t even come down firmly in favor of not raising the debt limit – let alone on introducing the kinds of spending cuts that would really make a difference in the long run, and that would signal to American taxpayers and the world that there is any seriousness about getting us out of debtor-nation slavery.

What sorts of cuts am I talking about? How about defunding Obamacare, the Department of Education, the EPA’s “cap and trade” scam, the FCC’s initiative to regulate the Internet and shut down talk radio, all foreign aid to countries that routinely fund terrorism and discriminate against Christians, and – yes, I’m saying it – the Cowboy Poetry Festival. That is just a tiny percentage of the wasteful and self-destructive government activity we can do without.

Individual Republican candidates may see some small change from me, if there is any left over after buying gas and inflated groceries, but RNC, don’t hold your breath.

If you care so much about what The New York Times, The Washington Post or The Huffington Post think, ask them for money.

If you were assuming absolute power over the most powerful country on earth, you’d smile, too.

How bad a president does Obama have to be, before you think, “Could Joe Biden be any worse?”

Our (nominal) president refuses to present us with any verifiable documents from his early personal history, from birth through college. We don’t know where he was born, when, or what his given name was, unless we accept his factually-challenged, vague and ghost-written “autobiography,” as the truth, and newspaper announcements and an after-the-fact “Certification of Live Birth” (as opposed to a certified birth certificate) that doesn’t name a hospital.

He allowed his Department of Justice to turn its back on an ironclad case of voter intimidation, because the intimidators were black. A DOJ investigator resigned and went on record as having been told that, while he was getting all the damning evidence of a crime that was needed to convict.

He and that same bunch of DOJ hacks have decided that the Defense of Marriage Act, a federal law enacted and signed during the Clinton years, is “unconstitutional,” and that they will not enforce it.

The legislative branch passed this law, as it is enabled to do by the constitution. The judicial branch reviewed the constitutionality of the law and passed on it, by which review it exercised its constitutional responsibility. The executive branch — whose chief executive is currently Barack Hussein Obama — acted completely outside its constitutionally-assigned role, in deciding not to enforce it.

This is nothing but a naked usurpation of power. The pattern of behavior of this president and his appointees is to make the executive branch supreme, and the constitution and the other two branches irrelevant.

If the Republican majority in the House of Representatives doesn’t file Impeachment charges against this power-hungry narcissist after all these blatant abuses, it will be choosing to become a puppet- show legislature, engaged in meaningless exercises in parliamentary sand-castle building.

And, it isn’t far from that now, is it?

The constitution, or whatever is left of it by the time the House discovers a backbone, specifies that, in the event the president is impeached or otherwise incapacitated, the vice president succeeds him. “President Joe Biden” is a scary thought, but not half as scary as letting this president continue to get his way.

[Author’s Note: The following, although written in July, 2003, is distressingly relevant. Change a few names and titles, and the truth is still true.]

What the heck is a SILRL Project? SILRL stands for Search for Intelligent Life in the Republican Leadership. It was my ongoing effort to discover some guiding intelligence in what passes for leadership in the Republican Party. I’m not talking about the kind of “intelligence” that Hollywood celebrities and Bill Clinton have — the mindless instinct for self-preservation and self-promotion based on saying what one thinks people want to hear. I’m talking about wisdom based on established principles, as enumerated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

I have reluctantly concluded that there is no intelligence to be found in the Republican leadership, and that further searching is a waste. The SILRL Project is now officially over, a failure.

Sometime in 1997, it became clear that the “Republican Revolution” of 1994 was more cosmetic than revolutionary. There is a disappointing pattern to Republican behavior at the leadership level. The umpteenth time I heard a Republican big shot on conservative talk radio say, “When we have a veto-proof majority in both houses of Congress, we’ll (abolish the Education Department, rein in the IRS, impeach traitorous judges, protect unborn children, re-establish Constitutional law, etc.),” I realized I was listening to a fund-raising ploy, and nothing more.

The only time the spineless fat cats in the Republican leadership make conservative noises is when they need money and time from us conservative grassroots types to get themselves re-elected. Between campaign seasons, we are noisy, unsophisticated bumpkins, who naively insist on adherence to some obscure historical document called the Constitution.

The Big Elephants cluck their tongues at us, and mutter about how we don’t seem to understand that, “politics is the art of the possible.” Translated into everyday English, that means, “Politics is the art of saying and doing what we need to say and do to get re-elected. What’s right and Constitutional is, well, ‘relative.’ Relatively unimportant, compared to getting re-elected.”

There are about a dozen, real, Constitutional conservatives among national Republican officeholders and party leaders, and the rest might as well be Democrats, or Socialists, for that matter. There is little, practical difference.

Ronald Reagan, while discussing why he left the Democratic Party of his youth, said something like, “I didn’t really leave them; they left me.” The old-time champions of the “little guy,” the everyday American, had become the New Deal, big-government socialists, with the apparent intent to federalize just about everything, from first-grade textbooks to flush toilets. They turned the act of killing unborn children from murder into a civil right, stripped the right of self-defense from individual citizens, and made institutionalized racism a federal policy to make up for decades of institutionalized racism. With few exceptions, the Republican minority carped, but went along.

Most establishment Republicans seem to want what the socialist Democrats want, but, more slowly, and with less overt impact on the stock market. In recent decades, the Republican party has become “democrat socialist lite.”

The enormous expansion of the Department of Education, usurping the control of schools from communities and addicting them to federal funds, while doing nothing to improve the quality of education, is but one example of Republican statism. The recent spasm of effort to subsidize prescription drugs with taxpayers’ money, in exchange for the votes of “seniors,” will increase dramatically the cost of health care, while reducing quality and stifling innovation. With a few exceptions, Republicans are on board, if only because (they hope) they will get more polite treatment, along with a few campaign dollars, from the AARP crowd.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist has turned out to be every bit as spineless and ineffectual as Trent Lott, and at least as willing to sacrifice principle for political success as Bob Dole. For a chance to appear on camera back-slapping with flatulent hacks like Byrd and Kennedy, and starry-eyed socialist utopians like Boxer and Clinton, Frist is willing to pledge our future incomes to the World Bank and our property rights to the Sierra Club.

This is the big jackpot the Republican leadership promised grassroots conservatives back in ’94. We who are not overjoyed are just being ingrates.

America is now becoming a socialist state, where individual freedom and responsibility, along with property rights and the sanctity of life, are anachronisms — obstacles on the road to “sustainable development” and “social justice.” And the Republican leadership is showing us the way. The Search for Intelligent Life in the Republican Leadership has been abandoned, because there is none to find. I’m taking my search to the right wing of the Libertarian party, next.

[Yes, I wrote this in August, 2004, at the end of the first term of GWB. It still applies, in nearly every detail. Interesting, no?]

As always, the Republican “leadership” has put out the call to American conservatives: it is time for us to come out of the shadows and support Republican candidates with our money, time and votes. Again.

I am not ancient, but I do remember the 1994 “Republican Revolution,” in which conservatives rallied to give the House of Representatives back to the Republicans after decades of Democrat control. Boy, were we going to see some changes when that happened! For a list of the ambitious goals set forth by Republicans after they broke the Democrat death grip on the House, search for “Contract with America” with your favorite search engine. I found it at http://www.house.gov/house/Contract/CONTRACT.html.

In addition to the ten procedural goals stated in the contract, there was heady talk of a real reform of the IRS – perhaps even taking away their extraordinary police-state powers, and making them abide by the due process protections of the Bill of Rights. Several federal departments had better watch out, we were told, because their unconstitutional powers were about to be curtailed, or uprooted, entirely.

We would see federal judges impeached for legislating from the bench. A Republican-controlled House would, as permitted by the Constitution, prohibit the remaining judicial meddlers from using their offices as engines for enacting their socialist agendas.

Conservatives had to be patient, because, as we were told repeatedly, “politics is the art of the possible.” These goals would not be achieved all at once. Of course, it would help if we gave the Republicans lots of money and campaigned on behalf of their candidates for the Senate, too, so “we” could control both houses. Then, watch out!

Abortion will be exposed as the obscene atrocity that it is. Our borders will be sealed against the toxic flood tides of illegal immigration. Our armed services will stop being used for grandiose “Meals on Wheels” projects. Government agencies will stop dictating to property owners how to use their property in order to protect toads and ferns. The list went on and on. Ah, those were heady times.

Well, it turns out that politics is actually the art of telling people what they want to hear, so they will help you get re-elected, over and over — and then telling them to get lost until the next campaign. At least, that’s politics as seen from this portion of the formerly-Republican, conservative grassroots.

In 1992 and 1996, the Republican presidential candidates ran disjointed, inept and rudderless campaigns, devoid of any principle that might be right, but that might also prove to be a political liability with the “moderates” we needed to fill our “bigger tent.” Dare to mention that legal abortion is the legal killing of unborn children, and well-heeled Republican flacks would rush in from the wings, shushing you and scolding you for harsh, offensive language that might upset the broad coalition “we” needed to capture the White House and both houses of the legislative branch. Dare to compare the IRS with armed robbers, or the Federal Reserve with counterfeiters, and you would be branded as a knuckle-dragging extremist.

Meanwhile, the federal bureaucracy, which grows and festers regardless of who is in the White House, continues to send its tentacles deeper into our lives. Do the Republicans do anything to curtail this cancerous growth? Au contraire, they feed it with enthusiasm. Non-defense spending with no Constitutional justification is way up. It’s not up quite enough to satisfy the big-government lefties in the Democrat Party, but it’s definitely up.

However, the federal law enforcement officers who are charged with protecting our borders have been told to smile at illegal aliens, including potential terrorists, and tell them, “Welcome to the United States.” We are supposed to make nice with the government of Mexico, despite its official policy of encouraging illegal immigration to the United States, and despite its frequent collusion with alien and drug smugglers.

We have a huge and growing bureaucracy dedicated to “homeland security,” but our borders are no more secure against invasion than they were before 9/11. Airport security goons — some of whom barely speak English, and may have illegal immigration “issues” of their own — strip-search and interrogate six-year-olds and elderly grandmothers trying to board commercial airliners. However, the pilots of those, same airliners are forced to jump endless bureaucratic hurdles before they can carry a pistol that might be the last line of defense against hijackers who want to turn the plane into a multi-ton cruise missile.

Despite the clear evidence over decades that increased government spending has zero effect on the quality of education, the federal Department of Education, an unconstitutional agency, grows in power and influence over public education, which is supposed to be a state and local function. Our current, Republican administration is proud of its effort to bloat this agency’s budget.

I could go on for quite some time about the ways in which the Republican Party has broken faith with the conservatives that used to comprise its base. However, by now you have either been convinced, or you have dismissed me as a crank.

Some will dwell on this topic long enough to ask me where I will take my loyalties, now that I am turning my back on the big, dumb elephants. I have decided I will vote for Michael Peroutka, and his US Constitution Party, http://www.constitutionparty.com/.

[Author’s Note: In 2008, I wrote in Alan Keyes, rather than vote for None of the Above, as Joseph Farah of World Net Daily recommends. I was undecided between these alternatives, until that last moment.]

I am through voting for the “lesser of the two evils.” I am through voting as if I were trying to pick a winning racehorse. I will vote for a president who will abide by the Constitution, and not by the opinion polls or the editorials in the New York Times. I am through with the “bogeyman theory” of politics, which dictates that voting for a third party candidate is tantamount to voting for the bogeyman of the moment.

George Bush and John Kerry are both bogeymen, and I’m through with them and the politics they represent. I will vote for Michael Peroutka. I will go to sleep election night knowing I did what was right for my country, and I will ask God, as I always do, to deliver us from all evils — greater and lesser.